means A textile is any cloth or fabric made by weaving, knitting, felting, or otherwise binding fibers and threads together.

from Straight from Latin textilis, "woven," from texere, "to weave." That same root spins out a whole family: "text" (words woven together), "texture," "context," even "subtle" (sub-tela, "beneath the warp"). The Romans saw clearly what we forget — that a sentence and a shawl are made the same way, by crossing threads until something holds.